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Responsible for Divyashakti, an adequately downbeat tale of revenge driven by principles and loss bolstered by an interesting villain, Tau (pronounced: taauu), played by Amrish Puri and two films with Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan (Main Khiladi Tu Anari, a rip-off of The Hard Way and Keemat), Sameer Malkan was last heard of when he finished a songless thriller shot in New York City and Philadelphia called Lips: The Kiss Of Death starring Anuj “KKusum” Saxena and Maushmi Udeshi. Despite getting the skin bits excised and getting slapped with an A certificate, the film reportedly still hasn’t made it to the marquee (or did it just quietly get out on DVD?). The film’s about the development and consequences of the crush an illegal Indian in the US has on the enigmatic young sexy wife of a middle-aged millionaire….

After the catchy, layered and eminently entertaining Dus Vishal-Shekhar return to toss in tunes for Anubhav Sinha’s crime caper Cash. With a mission statement for catchy dance-floor ditties, the duo gleefully turn to their experimental side that gave us adventures like right here right now from BluffMaster!, the title track for Golmaal: Fun Unlimited and the songs of I See You (especially subah subah).

Golmaal’s Anushka Manchanda returns to the playful layered Naughty Naughty, a song that seems to take off where that last song ended into a changing palette of moods and rhythms. Although she’s the only one credited on the track, the composer duo toss in vocal refrains and bandy questions and responses all over the track. The straight-faced lyrical nonsense mixes trance samples and a strong Dhol beat, tossing in the occasional Dholak for good measure.

The trio return in zaraa bach ke jii and this time everyone gets …

tum dono.n ne use zi.ndaa kabr me.n dafanaakar ek ghuTan-bharii maut dii hai; aur ab tum log is khulii hawaa kii har saa.Ns me.n har pal ghuTan mahasuus karoge
(father james/ amit shankar)

Before they clashed at the boundary of life and undeath in this Ramsay flick, Aryan Vaid and Heena Rehman already had Fun - Can Be Dangerous Sometime in common. Since Payal Rohatgi featured in the cast of that film, it is safe to assume that it wasn’t a complex layered film that intelligently explored the shifting dynamic of human relationships.

you devilish devil to the blood
(father james / amit shankar)

Heena Rehman having learnt from her dismal début in I Proud To Be Indian was quite happy swapping her husband, played by Aryan Vaid, with Siddharth Koirala. Acting as a pouting, piano-pumping spouse who gets bumped off by her husband and …

Bollywood DVDs continue to scale new depths in transfer quality and new heights in the quality of subtitles. The people working on these subtitles seem to have no clue about the language that the dialogues are being spoken in — or if they do, they’ve decided that the original text was too boring and decided to improvise. Here are a few items collected from the numerous hours watching evidence that the idiot box deserved its name.

Consider the odes to surrealism served up in movies like Shabd (kyo.n becomes why? 53 15) and Shikhar (the appearance of the cryptic 0618 10:46:5:12 10:46:54:00).

Consider the influences of jazz in the improvisatory liberties taken on lines of dialogue or fragments of lyrics. In Zeher, saahil kii tarah kaaTe mujhako chaahat kii har lahar is translated as every wave of love hits me like a bank; In Chocolate, beggar outside a temple is offered as …

Alfonso Cuarón achieves a rare and deeply satisfying balance between form and content with Children of Men, a tale set in a dystopian future (2027, we are told) plagued by infertility and hurtling to doom as people and lands are devastated by war, civil and political breakdown and terrorism. We are in the London of the future. The urban landscape is bleak, polluted, filthy and shrouded by depression and gloom. Despite this being years into the future, the vehicles don’t look futuristic at all, but merely aged versions of their current selves — double-decker buses look just as dusty and mundane; only advertising seems to have made big strides: billboards and bus signs are now animated. One of the advertising spots running even informs us that The world has collapsed; only Britain strives on. A nationalist government is aided by a brutal police force and all …